The Herald Sun today ran something of a non-story about a Melbourne Catholic primary-school teacher’s participation in Channel 7’s Make Me a Supermodel program.

The usual “family groups” are up in arms about the damage 24-year-old PE teacher Rhys Uhlich’s involvement in such a program could do to the school’s pupils, and children in general.

But the school — Sacred Heart Primary — and its students have reportedly thrown their support behind the teacher.

Not to be outdone, the Herald Sun — in what seems a blatant attempt to cook up some moral outrage among its readers and ensure a follow-up story with which it can bash the teacher, the program and “community standards” as a whole — has devised an online poll.

There are several honest ways such a poll question might be worded to ascertain readers’ views on the “controversy” — “Do you think a teacher’s participation in a modelling contest sends the wrong message to children?” is one.

But here’s the Herald Sun’s not-in-any-way-loaded question:

I urge everyone to head over there and vote “yes”, just to bugger up the online editor’s news schedule for tomorrow.

Welcome to Jeremy Sear who will post items at GrodsCorp that he considers too lowbrow for An Onymous Lefty — Ed
___________________

The Editor has already posted regarding the teacher ridiculously sacked for appearing in the sealed section of a Cleo magazine (posed nude but tastefully). Fortunately some sane parents have responded to the “complaints” by anonymous dimwits (what’s the harm, seriously?) by petitioning to have her reinstated.

I simply want to implore other teachers I know not to get ideas. Hopefully the recent bonus and pay rise will make Cleo’s $200 less enticing, but you never know with these people. They’ve got too much free time (I knew the ALP should have stuck to the demand to get rid of those pupil-free days) and of course public debauchery is the inevitable result. I guess that’s why the minister caved, before the teachers’ union had a chance to copy the half-naked cabbies.

They’re not all Ms Tziolas, you know.

In NSW teachers get sacked for doing nude photo shoots with their partners in the Cleo sealed section.

A Sydney primary school teacher has been sacked for participating in a magazine nude photo shoot with her partner.

[...]

Mrs Tziolas appeared in the sealed section of Cleo magazine with her husband and nine other couples talking about their sex lives.

[...]

“As teachers we’re expected to be somewhat superhuman and not have a private life,” she said.

“It’s denying the fact that teachers are normal. Yes we have sex, yes we enjoy it…”

In Victoria teachers get cautioned by the offensively useless Victorian Institute of Teaching for buying students grog, discussing sex lives and swapping phone numbers.

A TEACHER who helped a student buy a slab of beer and discussed her sexual habits has been allowed to remain in the classroom.

And despite claims the teacher also talked about using marijuana to “wean herself” off painkillers, the price of cocaine and losing her virginity, Victoria’s teaching watchdog has found she deserves a second chance.

The Victorian Institute of Teaching found that Louise Margaret Huntington engaged in “misconduct” by failing to engage in “professional relationships” with her students.

A panel of three teachers found Ms Huntington displayed “professional immaturity” when she swapped phone numbers with a 17-year-old male student from another school in December 2006 and began seeing him outside school hours.

The secondary school teacher — who talked to the student about her lesbian relationships — allowed the teenager to stay the night at her house after driving him to a supermarket to buy beer.

Somewhere in the middle is the right approach.

The Editor, John Surname, Jeremy Sear, Keri, Chuck A. Spear and Craig discuss:

* Teh gays
* Cab driver and teacher strikes
* Austrian hostages in basements
* SBS hidden cameras
* Ronaldo’s man-whore problem
* Bill Heffernan vs. Justice Kirby in the GrodsThink naked cagefight

** Because Ant Rogenous is using all the bandwidth to download instructional Fleshlight videos use only the “Play in popup” link or the “Download” link. **

[display_podcast]

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I’ve been reading over the media reports of the new pay deal for teachers that has brought The Editor almost to the brink of orgasm – and, as expected, some things don’t add up. According to Victorian politicians the deal makes the state’s teachers “the highest paid in the country”, and The Age’s little insert certainly seems to verify this:

State-by-state teacher salaries:
Maximum for a classroom teacher
Victoria – 2007: $65,414, 2008: $75,500
NSW – 2007: $72,454, 2008: $75,352
Queensland – 2007: $69,225, 2008: $71,994
South Australia – 2007: $68,422, 2008: $68,422
West Australia – 2007: $67,446, 2008: $71,206
ACT – 2007: $71,767, 2008: $74,279
Northern Territory: 2007: $70,047, 2008: $72,849

Sounds good, classroom teachers getting a $10k raise straight-up this year. Yet when you read the fine print that’s not actually how it works: the additional $10k will be phased in over three years: 4.9% in the first (about $3,200, taking them to about $68,600) and 2.7% in the second and third years of the agreement. That still leaves them well below NSW teachers at any given time.

In 2010 Victorian teachers’ pay will certainly overtake NSW teachers’ salary rates – but they’ll be the NSW salary rates of 2008 - and it’s highly likely that NSW teachers will have renegotiated their own agreement by then (it expires this year). Brumby and Pike’s claim that Victorian teachers will be the best-paid in Australia looks to be smoke-and-mirrors.

But it’s not all doom and gloom – The Editor gets $1000 to put on the bar at the Grodscorp Christmas Party. Huzzah!

UPDATE

According to the press today I am wrong, that this $10k pay jump is instantaneous and those scumbag Maoist teachers are actually getting 33-38% over the life of the agreement (sounds a bit far-fetched if you ask me). But the government is still sticking to its 4.9% thang. We’ll probably have to rely on The Ed to give us a clearer picture once he receives his new pay scales (if he has sobered up by then). 

Also, Zombie Mao informs us that the Oz is informing us that this will be the end of the fiscal world as we know it.

School healthy eating schemes to tackle obesity are driving teenage girls towards eating disorders, according to new research.
Attempts to drum home healthy eating message were making pupils acutely aware of their weight and inadvertently driving some to potentially dangerous behaviour, the Loughborough University researchers said. (Source)

So if we want to stop childhood eating disorders, The Ed and his Maoist comrades-in-chalk need to stop making fat kids feel fat by promoting healthy body types (yes, it’s all their fault again). As a community service – and to help The Ed out with his teachering – I’ve provided some useful lesson ideas and phrases to avoid this situation in future:

“Boys and girls, this is called ‘celery’. Blleeeeeeeaaaaahhh. Have a donut.”

“It’s a lovely day today, kids… bugger PE, let’s break out the nachos.”

“Self-esteem is very important, Grade Five. Go home and smash all the mirrors.”

“Listen up now for an important a commerce lesson: ‘How to get full value from upsizing’.”

“Today we’re going to go to the Library and research a great person from history. You can choose from John Candy, Chris Farley, Ricky May, Rodney Dangerfield or Kim Beazley.”

“Flab has benefits, boys: if it hangs over far enough, no-one can see your weiner in the showers.”

“You can be morbidly obese and still play sport … just look at Groupthink FC. And you can’t see their weiners in the showers.”

Victorian Premier John Brumby chants that education is his number one priority like a mantra, but utterly fails in making it so — Victoria can proudly claim that it has the lowest paid teachers in the country. After months of negotiations with the teachers’ union (following months of the government refusing to negotiate at all) the union has reduced its ambit claim of 10% per year to nothing more than pay parity with NSW teachers. But Brumby won’t budge from the government’s standard offer of a barely-CPI 3.25% rise per year with anything over this figure to be offset by productivity gains. Ask any teacher where there’s room in their work day for extra productivity and they’ll probably laugh at you before punching your lights out.

But here’s the weird thing: Victorian opposition leader, the Liberals’ Ted Baillieu, is promising to make Victorian teachers the best paid in the country if elected in 2010. This shit’s messing with my mind.

Usually when two unrelated events are juxtaposed nobody gives a toss – except tabloid reporters. To them, some chains-of-events are logically connected. Teachers go on strike… kids get day off school… kids go surfing… kid gets bitten by a shark and dies… teachers indirectly responsible. Otherwise why would just about every major media outlet mention the teachers’ strike within the first two or three pars of their stories? And then there’s this buffoonery in their online comments:

Let’s hope that the teachers who were on strike, and in particular the teachers who would normally have been teaching Brock and Peter today, suffer lifelong guilty consciences because of their ultimately deadly decision not to work today. It’s time teachers woke up to themselves, and realised that their petty strike actions can have potentially far-reaching and disastrous effects way beyond the reaches of the classrooms and innocent children they desert. Yet another nail in the coffin of teachers’ credibility? You bet. RIP Peter.
Posted by: ausGeoff of Frankston

Of course if it wasn’t teachers – and perhaps sharks – then it would barely rate a mention. Otherwise we should expect to see similar stretches of logic like:

McDonald’s outrage: kid hit by truck while crossing road for burger

…or…

Man dies from heart attack while jogging; family sues Adidas

…or…

Blogger electrocuted while reading GrodsCorp; Editor to blame

A bunch of us from work went out last night to celebrate a colleague’s birthday. (When I say “went out” what I mean is “went to the shitty pub 100m down the road from the school”; when I say “celebrate” what I mean is “get horribly shitfaced”.) So we got there about 5pm after finishing work with the intention of just having a quick one before moving on to somewhere a bit nicer but despite all good intentions we were still there at midnight.

The biggest problem with going to the pub around the corner is that there are always people there from the school community who probably shouldn’t see the teachers making arses of themselves — and last night was no exception. At 8pm we signed up for the trivia quiz and you’ll all be proud to know that our team name was “The Fleshlights”. Two hours later we had disgraced ourselves by coming stone, motherless second last and by making the team who marked our answer sheets question our intelligence.

Question 23: How many millimetres in a kilometre?

The question should have been: How many plastered teachers does it take to answer such an easy question?

Anyway, after an uncomfortable minute of slurred arguments we wrote down 1 million. Or at least, we thought we wrote down 1 million. It turns out we left a zero off and wrote 100,000. So when the smug bastards on the other team returned our corrected answer sheet they said, “don’t worry — we won’t report you to the education department.”

Arseholes.

Today’s Crikey has an interesting snippet:

I have been told that some Victorian state school principals get a percentage bonus if they can make staff savings within the school. For example, if a teacher goes on long service leave, and instead of being replaced by another teacher, they are replaced by the teachers within the school (as extras or in-lieus, which cost the school nothing), then the principal gets a percentage of the money that would have gone to hiring the teacher. My current principal apparently got a five figure bonus last year from this. It may just be Victorian Education Dept policy, or it may be a school based one, I’m not too sure.

Speaking as one of the poor (and regularly striking) underpaid teachers, I think it stinks to high heaven. That the school administration makes these decisions … based on personal profit, not educational lines, is wrong. That this is hidden from most staff is even worse. Incidentally, the feeling among many Victorian state teachers is either: a) We should be taking more comprehensive action (like the nurses last year) to achieve our goals, ie. full day strikes, but we are too bound by the old workchoices legislation. b) We should be withdrawing our support and involvement in the extra-curricular activities we do. The only way the parents can see how under pressure we are.

Teachers have been against performance-based pay for ages, saying how it’s good in theory but impractical and indefinable in practice. But this is evidence that performance-based pay is possible: just work your way up to principal, screw your colleagues over, save the department a fat wad of cash and walk away with enough for a new plasma TV and a trip to Fiji.

On another note, what should The Ed be withdrawing or withholding to give added teeth to the strike? I suggest he refuses to give out any stale Minties, lend any colour pencils and post any more Fleshlight jokes until Pike coughs up his 10 per cent.   

As noted previously Victorian teachers are stopping work today in support of the union’s claim for better pay and conditions. As Bridgit quite rightly points out I should be — and am — ashamed of myself. But I’m not the only one who should be feeling the sickly burden of shame. On page three of today’s Age is a picture of the concerned looking parent that Bridgit spoke of, leaning on the wall of her kitchen next to a small blackboard containing a list of the week’s events. I’d show you a photo of the photo (original photo not online) but the stupid batteries in my stupid camera are dead, so you’ll have to live with a written reproduction of the blackboard.

Wed — Swimming
– Teacher’s strike

Thurs — Drms

Fri — VCE Conf

According to our Disgruntled Mornington Mum (DMM) there is only one teacher going on strike today.

As The Editor today goes on strike and attends a rally in the CBD (interspersed, no doubt, with a couple of lattes) he should heed the words of disgruntled Mornington mum Karon Baker:

“What other person earns a 10% increase every year?” she asked. “It’s absurd that they believe they’re due a 30% pay rise over three years. I think that’s absolutely ridiculous… Teachers are starting to put themselves up on pedestals and it’s about time they were knocked down again,” she said.

She’s got good reason to feel annoyed, Ed. Her daughter, a Year 11 student, has missed a day’s part-time work because you Mao-loving commie bastards went on strike out of the blue (i.e. organised three months ago) as part of your greedy grab-for-cash. It is ludicrous that you bludging teachers expect parity with your fellow commies in other states while ROBBING TEENAGERS OF THEIR PART-TIME JOBS! I mean it’s not like they should be studying, learning from their crappily-paid teachers or anything important like that … not when there’s $7.85-an-hour shifts at McDonald’s, Bi-Lo or Woolies to be had. Hang your head in shame, Ed.

Meanwhile, an equally rounded ‘expert’ on education (he allegedly attended school) teachers (he’s married to one) and Kevin Rudd (he reads Tim Blair) proffers a completely unbiased evaluation of the ALP’s education policy here.

UPDATE
Herald-Sun readers join in the fight to bring those uppity teachers down a peg or two:

“Teachers have it easy. They technically work 5 hours a day & they get 14 weeks off a year. They have the nerve to claim they are stressed & underpaid.” (Manuk, Glenroy)

“…if they diservie a pay rise 30% who do they think they are ? come one Brumby use the work choices law you have and fine these teachers and fine them hard. AS YOU CAN TELL I CANT SPELL WHOES FAULT THE TEACHERS WHO WENT ON STRIKE.” (Ray, Werribee)

“They might be worth a pay rise if they could teach any other thing apart from left wing propaganda.” (Sam, Melbourne)

“Why do teachers demand a pay rise, when kids today cant read or write . how about the community walfare people working with dangoures people now thay deserve a pay rise no you teachers.” (Elena, Melbourne)

Cop that Ed!